Enclosure, Keamsellagh, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Keamsellagh, Co. Galway

In a flat stretch of reclaimed farmland in Keamsellagh, Co. Galway, there is a place the local community once called Seanbhaile, meaning "old settlement" or "old town" in Irish.

That name alone suggests a long memory of occupation, yet what survives on the ground is fragmentary at best: the ghost of an enclosure, its walls largely dismantled by generations of land clearance, and the low outlines of rectangular house sites barely distinguishable from the surrounding field system.

The enclosure was recorded on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a trapezoidal shape, and a mid-twentieth-century classification by McCaffrey in 1952 tentatively identified it as a stone fort, noting overall dimensions of roughly 53 metres by 40 metres, with walls approximately 1.5 metres wide and up to 1.2 metres high. Stone forts of this kind, also known as cashels, were enclosures typically built with dry-laid stone walls to define a settlement or farmstead, and were common across the west of Ireland from the early medieval period onward. By the time an inspection was carried out in February 1983, the picture was considerably reduced. The enclosure had contracted to roughly 38 metres north to south and 35 metres east to west, and only the eastern end of the southern wall retained anything close to its original character, where large boulders set on edge remained in situ forming the wall's inner face. The western and northern sides had largely disappeared, replaced by loose runs of stone and, on the northern edge, an ordinary field boundary. Inside the enclosure, three rectangular house platforms, each approximately 8 metres long and 4 metres wide, were defined by low drystone walls and considered likely to date from the nineteenth century, suggesting the site remained in use, or was reoccupied, long after its original construction. A further settlement cluster lies roughly 24 metres to the west, hinting that this corner of Keamsellagh once held a denser concentration of activity than its present quiet fields would suggest.

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